“No,” I replied. “But my mommy is pregnant with a baby.”
She wasn’t pregnant with a baby, not even a tiny bit, and had to explain as much when the teacher promptly congratulated her on the “coming addition.”
“Do you want a brother or sister?” my mother asked me that night as we ate takeout Chinese off the coffee table. “Is that why you lied?”
“Sure,” I responded, as casually as if she’d offered me an extra moo shu pancake.
So, unbeknownst to me, my vote tipped the scales, and they began to try in earnest. I continued with my routine, unaware of the storm brewing in the bedroom down the hall. And two years later, on a boiling day in June, my mother turned toward me from the driver’s seat of our Volvo and said, “Guess what? You’re going to have a baby sister.”
“No, I’m not,” I replied.
“Yes, you are,” she said, smiling wide. “Just like you wanted.”
“Oh,” I told her. “I changed my mind.”
Grace came late in January, on a school night, no less. My mother’s water broke, splashing the hardwood in front of the elevator, after which she waddled back to my bedroom and put me to sleep. When I woke up at 3:00 A.M. the house was dark, save for a light glowing from my parents’ bedroom. I crept down the hall, where I found a babysitter named Belinda reading on their bed, next to a porcelain doll I had requested from an ad in TV Guide (five payments of $11.99) and a pile of wrapped peppermints.
In the morning I was walked down Broadway to the hospital, where Grace was the only Caucasian infant in a nursery of Chinese babies. I peered through the glass: “Which one is she?” I asked.
My mother lay in a hospital bed. Her belly still looked as full as it had the day before but soft now, like a Jell-O mold. I tried not to stare at her reddened breasts, hanging from her kimono. She was tired and pale, but she watched me expectantly as I sat in a chair and my father placed the baby carefully in my lap. She was long, with a flat red face and a bulbous, flaky skull. She was limp and helpless, flexing and unfurling her minuscule fist. I found my new doll significantly cuter. He held up the Polaroid camera, and I raised Grace like I would the prize rabbit at a 4-H fair.
I spent Grace’s first night at home wailing “INTRUDER! RETURN HER!” until I exhausted myself and fell asleep in an armchair. The feeling was so sharp, so distinctly tragic, that I have never forgotten it, even though I have never felt it again. Maybe it’s the sensation of finding a lover in your spouse’s bed. Maybe it’s more like getting fired from the job you’ve had for thirty years. Maybe it’s just the feeling of losing what is yours.
From the beginning, there was something unknowable about Grace. Self-possessed, opaque, she didn’t cry like a typical baby or make her needs clear. She wasn’t particularly cuddly, and when you hugged her (at least when I hugged her), she would wriggle to get free like a skittish cat. Once, when she was around two, she fell asleep on me in a hammock, and I sat as still as I could, desperate not to wake her. I nuzzled her downy hair, kissed her chubby cheek, ran my pointer finger along her thick eyebrow. When she finally awoke it was with a jolt, as if she had fallen asleep on a stranger on the subway.
Grace’s playpen sat in the middle of the living room, between the couch and the dining room table I had carved my name into. We conducted our lives around her, my parents talking on twin telephones, me drawing pictures of “fashion girls” and “crazy men.” Occasionally I would kneel on the floor in front of her, stick my face into the mesh of her enclosure, and coo, “Hiii, Graaacie.” Once she leaned in and placed her lips on my nose. I could feel them, hard and thin, through the barrier. “Mom, she kissed me! Look, she kissed me!” I leaned in again, and she bit down hard on my nose with her two new teeth and laughed.
As she grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a “motorcycle chick.” Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just “relax on me.” Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying. Maybe, I thought, she would be more willing to accept kisses if I wore the face mask my grandmother had for when she did her dialysis. (The answer was no.) What I really wanted, beyond affection, was to feel that she needed me, that she was helpless without her big sister leading her through the world. I took a perverse pleasure in delivering bad news to her—the death of our grandfather, a fire across the street—hoping that her fear would drive her into my arms, would make her trust me.
“If you don’t try so hard it’ll be better,” my father said. So I hung back. But once she was sleeping, I would creep into her room and listen to her breathe: in, out, in, out, in again, until she rolled away.